If you are not a Batman fan, there is something seriously wrong with you, but if you are, you have to love everything about him, but nothing as much as the Batmobile and the Batwing. While the two are real only for the movie, Tactical Robotics, a subsidiary of the Israeli aerospace firm Urban Aeronautics has been developing a VTOL (Vertical Takeoff and Landing) aircraft for several years that looks much like the Batwing which they called the AirMule VTOL earlier, and now call it the Cormorant. While it was designed solely for military purposes, the company announced that its Metro Skyways subsidiary is working on a civilian aircraft based on the same technology. Metro Skyways has revealed the first images and the details of the private plane, and they call it the CityHawk.
The craft names on the city where the Wright brothers made their first flight called Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The shape and the size of the plane are similar to the Cormorant. The company has a patented Fancraft technology for the craft, with internal rotor blades, unlike the traditional exposed rotor of the helicopter. Thus the CityHawk can land and take off in a relatively smaller space with no risk of damage to the rotor blades.
The civilian aircraft will be flown by a human pilot, carrying four passengers. The first version of CityHawk will feature a high degree of autonomy, but there are plans for an entirely robotic flight in the future, just like the Cormorant that already flies autonomously.
Similar technology was there in the EHang 184 passenger drones, that are expected to be cruising Dubai skies this year. However, unlike EHang, the CityHawk will not be battery powered, it will initially run on jet fuel. There will be a possibility of converting the fuel source to liquid hydrogen, and 700-bar compressed hydrogen. It will be purely dependent on the maturity of technology with time. It might fully eliminate the need for fuel cells or electric motors, by employing a direct hydrogen feed system into a specially designed turboshaft engine. Till now these are all the ifs and buts, as of now, it is just a jet fuel-powered flying car. If something goes wrong midflight, a rocket-deployed parachute system will bring the craft to the ground safely.
The CityHawk will not be seen anytime soon as Urban Aeronautics says the development will take a minimum of five years. The design will not be classic weapon-ish like the Cormorant, but it will fly just as well as the military craft does in the video below:
Source: Urban Aeronautics
